After the Pi-Day Storm: "Ah! Bright Wings!"

The raging storms pounded St. Louis on "Pi Day," which is celebrated on 3/14 especially in St. Louis Area Code 314 with great delight for math geeks and pie lovers alike - March 14, 2024. Three really fascinating aspects marked the day.

First - The severe storms:

The storms reminded us how fragile our sweet Earth is, how vulnerable our River City is to the effects of severe storms - tornados, hail, and spring floods.

Severe storms unmoor us from the illusion of safety and normalcy and heighten our full sensorium. It's really hard not to feel fully alive. Storms re-wild us for navigating life in a precarious, seemingly infinite universe.

Of course, there were many photos of baseball-size hail stones whomping our fair city's delicate spring blossoms, and the images permeated our text strings and social media posts. Weather forecasters were inundated with monster hail images and damaged roofs and windows. But then something truly exhilarating followed.

Second - What happened AFTER:

What amazes me is how many nature enthusiasts captured photos beyond the storm. They went flying across email, tv screens and social media. The rippling phenomenon was its own beauty parade - the scenic sunset AFTER the storms. A truly stunning, awesome way to conclude a day devoted to celebrating a mathematical koan, a metaphor that obscures what it intends to communicate, like a "constant" wrapped in eternity. It didn't escape me that nature's language is the meta-metaphor, the Mother tongue from which all language derive. The scintillating, calming sunset culminating the day of chaos and disintegration. The effervescent "Ahhhhh" of a day that was gnarly and fierce, biting and even vicious.

Third - A mathematical Mystery that keeps on giving:

Pi (for the Greek letter Pi) - is considered a "constant" number, and represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. A circle is a little over three times its width around. Circles fascinated ancient Greek philosophers, for whom the circle was a symbol of divine symmetry and balance in nature. Greek mathematicians explored the properties of circles for centuries, and our enduring fascination continues today. Pi has been calculated to over 50 trillion digits beyond its decimal point (usually shortened to 3.14). It is considered an irrational and transcendental number, and it will continue infinitely without repetition or pattern. Whoa.

As I contemplated Pi, the circle, the raging storms, and the astounding sunset - while enjoying a slice of double-layer pumpkin pie with my sister - it occurred to me that poetry is probably the best response to such abiding Mystery.

English Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (1844-1889) wrote "God's Grandeur" in the unfolding of the Industrial Revolution, when human decimation of Earth's natural beauty and bounty began its inexorable march toward environmental degradation. Hopkins' words of wonder and hope permeate a world "seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil." And while his verses lament the "smudge" and "smell" of pollution, rot, excess, decay, and environmental exploitation that characterized the late 19th century, he knew through the eyes of faith that life ALWAYS finds a way, that the gorgeous sunset - and the following sunrise announce - "And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things."

So, like Pi, like the circle, the glorious sunset after the storms - and like the mysterious "lights off the black West went" - it seems like it's going to be this way. And YIKES, is it better with Pi/Pie!

"God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.